I’m
still pulling together an announcement so I don’t have a detailed
write-up yet, but I wanted to note that I’m putting together
the-most-incredible-offer-ever for audio ebooks for Illinois libraries
(not just MLS libraries). It’s one of the other Really Big Projects I’m
working on right now.

If you’re thinking about signing a contract
for digital audiobooks, DON’T commit to anything until you hear this
offer. If you’re dying for more info, call or email me at MLS, but I should have some info up here soon. I promise you won’t find a better deal anywhere else!

Some insight into the nature of memory.
When I started work on a memoir about my childhood, I thought
remembering what actually happened would be the easy part. I had very
specific memories of very specific events, and I wrote them down
exactly as I remembered them. One memory involved my stepsister winning
Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy album at a pumpkin carving [...] [Cognitive Daily]11:50:50 PM Google It!.

Communities of Practice and Complexity :
Conversation and Culture. Peter Bond illustrates some important
underlying principles of communities of practice. Bond's
graph mapping a community's degree of formalism with its
'emotional energy' looks almost exactly like a graph drawn
by Francisco
Varela at a session I attended in 1994 or so.
Varela, though, mapped link density against information
transmission. His sweet spot - enough information to create
semantically relevance, but not so much as to create chaos
- maps almost exactly against Bond's sweet spot for
communities of practice. I don't think this correlation is
accidental; I think they were mapping the same thing. Take
the two concepts together and you arrive what the ideal
degree of connectivity between entities in order to create
a maximal online community. And that point is the modified
scale free network I tried to desribe in Community
Blogging, and I continue to believe (though I
can't prove it) that the mathematics expressing this sweet
spot may be found in the study of Boltzmann
machines. With Bond, I recommend the study of
what he calls "an extraordinary theoretical base,
primarily derived from a biological perspective of human
behaviour and cognition, and how it might be used to better
understand the concept of communities of practice."
Via Nancy
White. By Peter Bond, LeaderValues, November,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]11:49:55 PM Google It!.

Creating e-Portfolios using Atom and
FOAF. Some nice thinking by Scott Wilson which starts
off on the right foot: "An e-Portfolio is, by
definition, an aggregate or composite of many facets."
What I have been calling a profile.
He then lists the types of feeds that work together to
create an e-portfolio, and outlines the various XML
languages - Atom (which is similar to RSS), IMS
e-portfolio, HR-XML and FOAF - that enable these feeds.
By Scott Wilson, Scott Wilson's Workblog, June 3, 2006
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]11:46:51 PM Google It!.